How to Apologize (With Some Help from Oprah)

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The Internet is an outrage economy. Every morning, an army of the grumpy and the underemployed scour the news of the world for things to get upset about. Sometimes, it's hard to find stuff, and standards slip. Do the Rolling Stones suffer from ageism? Did a rodeo clown make an inappropriate comment about the President? Nobody really asks themselves: Who cares? Or, Should I actually give a shit about this? The rule is: as much outrage as possible no matter how negligible or irrelevant the source. The outrage economy has one unintended consequence: It's increased the number of insincere apologies necessary. More than ever people from all walks of life find themselves in need of the kind of apologies where you don't really mean it, but you just want to put the outrage behind you and move on with your life.

Fortunately I'm a Canadian which means that I know passive-agression apologies the way people in Indiana know basketball or people in Texas know football. I was born into it and I've been surrounded by it my whole life. The old joke is that when you step on a Canadian's foot, he says "I'm sorry." It's not actually much of a joke. I've done it dozens of times. Often Canadian apologies are mistaken for politeness, which is a mistake. When I say "sorry," what I mean is "Asshole, you're on my foot."

Americans are quickly catching up with the Canadian way of the apology. Bradley Manning showed the new methodology which I assume has been worked out by some committee of PR professionals. It has three stages:

1) Pretend to apologize unreservedly. "First, your honour, I want to start off with an apology. I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I am sorry that I hurt the United States."

2) Make it clear that you're not offering excuses while you offer excuses. "Although a considerable difficulty in my life, these issues are not an excuse for my actions. I understood what I was doing, and decisions I made. However I did not fully appreciate the broader effects of my actions."

3) Claim that you have been transformed into a different person. "Those factors are clear to me now, through both self-refection during my confinement in various forms, and through the merits and sentencing testimony that I have seen here." By now, of course, this pattern is so well-established that it amounts to cliché. We all know that this has about as much meaning as the "Dear Sir" at the beginning of a letter: pure formality. Still, it has to be done.

This week, there have been a couple of apologies where the apologists themselves can't really bring themselves to buy into the worked-out pattern. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, summarily fired an employee during a conference call with over a thousand people in a pretty brutal way. He later wrote, "I am writing you to acknowledge the mistake I made last Friday during the Patch all-hands meeting when I publicly fired Abel Lenz. It was an emotional response at the start of a difficult discussion dealing with many people's careers and livelihoods. I am the C.E.O. and leader of the organization, and I take that responsibility seriously." He clearly couldn't quite bring himself to say the word "apology," preferring to go with "acknowledge the mistake." Then he went straight into self-justification, and even self-promotion. This is a lousy apology and everybody who saw it knew it: Why make a statement at all if you're just going to make yourself look like more of a jerk?

Even more dubious was Def Jam founder Russell Simmons's apology for tweeting that he enjoyed a skit about Harriet Tubman porn. He wrote:

My first impression of the Harriet Tubman piece was that it was about what one of actors said in the video, that 162 years later, there's still tremendous injustice. And with Harriet Tubman outwitting the slave master? I thought it was politically correct. Silly me. I can now understand why so many people are upset." He may as well have written, "I am forced to apologize because there is an ocean of humorless people who want me to."

Again: why bother?

Neither Simmons's nor Armstrong's apologies worked; both men appeared weaker and less sensitive afterwards.

It was Oprah who showed the world how to apologize. She told the Associated Press on Monday that she regretted telling the story of how she went into a store in Switzerland and a storegirl refused to let her see a 38,000 dollar purse because she didn't look "rich" enough. "I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland. I'm really sorry that it got blown up. I purposefully did not mention the name of the store. I'm sorry that I said it was Switzerland." Watch a genius at work. First of all, she makes herself look Mandela-like in her capacity for forgiveness — I mean, if I was Oprah and some storegirl wouldn't let me look at a purse, I'd return to the store with a submachine gun. Then she won't even mention the name of the joint, which is even more brilliant. If there were a store, there would be a specific institution to hate, a specific woman. Now it's all of Switzerland to blame.

Oprah used her apology to raise herself up ever so subtly and reduce her enemies even as she seems to want to help them. That's how you do it: almost invisible passive aggression. A truly masterful apology. One might even say that it verged on the Canadian.